A closer look
Charles Dow originally launched the famous Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1896 with a surprisingly pathetic roster of only twelve heavily concentrated companies, primarily focusing on railroads, cotton, and gas lighting conglomerates. Today, global financial media treats this incredibly arbitrary index as a sacred, infallible barometer for the entire health of the complex American economy, even though it now only tracks thirty hand-picked blue-chip stocks out of thousands of publicly traded corporate entities. When a news anchor grimly reports that the market plummeted hundreds of points, causing widespread panic among retail investors, they are essentially just announcing that a few massive tech and healthcare monopolies had a slightly bad Tuesday afternoon. It is deeply amusing that the psychological well-being of modern retirement accounts relies entirely on an outdated statistical metric invented before the invention of the airplane by a guy who just wanted to sell more financial newspapers
